Burn Marks

by Sara Paretsky

  “You could have called me at home if you needed me- I’d have been happy to go see you.”

  Under my office lights her skin color looked healthier than when she’d been in the hospital. Her dour hostess apparently was looking after her well.

  “Didn’t want to do that. I didn’t know who you lived with, whether they’d let you talk to me.” She lowered herself carefully into my utilitarian guest chair. “Anyway, I didn’t want Maisie to hear me on the phone to you.”

  I dumped the mail on my desk and swiveled in the desk chair to face her. My desk faces the window with the guest chairs behind it so that a steel barrier won’t intimidate visitors.

  “I heard on the news you’d been hurt in that fire last week. Across from the Indiana Arms, wasn’t it?” She nodded to herself and I waited patiently for her to continue. “Maisie says leave you to yourself-you got Cerise in trouble, leastways your aunt did, let you get yourself out by yourself.”

  I didn’t feel responsible for Cerise’s death, but I also didn’t see what purpose arguing about it with her would serve. Anyway, she could well be right about Elena, at least partially right.

  “it seemed to me the two of them had some scheme going,” I ventured. “I thought maybe they wanted to pretend Katterina had died so they could collect a big award from the insurance company.”

  “You could be right.” She sighed unhappily. “You could be right. Blaming you doesn’t take away the pain of having a child like that, one that uses heroin and crack and God knows what-all else, and steals and lies. It’s just easier to blame you than lie in bed asking myself what I should of done different.”

  “Elena’s no prize, either,” I offered. “But my dad was her brother and they didn’t make ′em any better than him.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t bring her up. If I hadn’t a had to work so hard, be gone all the time-” She broke herself off. “No use talking about it now. It’s not why I came up here. Took me three buses too.”

  After a brooding silence in which her full lips disappeared into a narrow slit in her face, she said, “It’s no news to you that that aunt of yours, that Elena, likes to tell a story or two.”

  She waited for my agreement before continuing. “So she claims she saw someone talking to Jim Tancredi a few weeks before the fire, and then she came over to my room the night the place burned down telling me he’d been there again.”

  She smiled in embarrassment. “You gotta understand, the kind of life we lead, any new face is excitement. Maybe you wouldn’t of been interested, but I was. And that was when she saw I had my little granddaughter with me, Cerise and Otis dropped her off, you know, and she gets real righteous about how no children can be in the building and she’ll talk to Tancredi about it, so I give her the price of a bottle and she goes off, but I figure I’d better get our little princess over to Maisie. With an alkie like Elena you can’t trust her to keep her mouth shut just because she says she will.”

  When she looked at me defensively I grunted agreement-knew that chapter and verse on Elena too well to argue the point. “What did she say about the man she’d seen? Black, white, young, old?”

  She shook her head regretfully. “He was white, I’m pretty sure of that, even though she didn’t say it in so many words. But she said he had the most gorgeous eyes, that was her expression, and I can’t see her using it about a black man.”

  That was really helpful-Elena thought every man under eighty-five had the most gorgeous eyes. Still, she’d used it in my hearing. The night of the fire. Vinnie the banker, he came to chew me out and she told me not to upset a boy with such gorgeous eyes.

  That memory brought the elusive face in the crowd at the Prairie Shores to the forefront of my mind. Vinnie. Vinnie, who shouldn’t have been within fifteen miles of the Near South Side. I’d opened my eyes as the paramedics were carrying me through the crowd and seen him looking down at me. It was a slide shown so briefly on my retina that I only now remembered opening my eyes for that brief flash.

  I came slowly back to the room. At first I thought I’d have to revise my agenda for the day and go racing off to see him. But as the rushing in my head subsided and reason returned, I remembered I didn’t know which bank he worked for.

  “You okay?” Zerlina asked anxiously.

  “I’m fine. I think it’s just possible I may know who she was talking about.” Although would Elena have hidden the fact that she’d seen Vinnie before? Wouldn’t it be more in keeping with her to issue sly hints? There hadn’t been time, though-we’d been fighting about whether she could stay. That could have driven Vinnie from her mind. And then that night she and Cerise showed up together, they started with a story about Katterina, but after they were in bed together Elena suggested blackmailing Vinnie as a better idea. At that point of course she wouldn’t say anything about him to me.

  “Elena’s disappeared again,” I said abruptly. “Took off from her hospital bed Saturday morning. She’d taken a pretty good blow to the head and shouldn’t have been walking, let alone running.”

  “They didn’t say nothing about her on TV, just you on account of you being a detective. And that you’d rescued your aunt, which I was pretty sure had to be Elena. I didn’t come here today because of her, but I’m sorry for her. She’s not an evil person, you know, nor Cerise wasn’t, either. Just weak, both of them.”

  She brooded over it in silence for a bit. When it was clear there wasn’t anything else she wanted to say, I asked if I could give her a lift.

  “Um-unh. I show up in some white girl’s car everyone on the street’s going to be up telling Maisie about it. No, I’ll just go back the way I came. It doesn’t matter, taking three buses, you know-I don’t have anything else to do with my time these days.”

  The rush of excitement I’d felt over remembering seeing Vinnie at the fire died away after Zerlina left, and with it much of my earlier euphoria. It was hard to think about her life and that of Elena and maintain a great flow of good cheer. Then, too, the more I considered Vinnie as an arsonist the less sense it made. Maybe he was a pyromaniac sociopath, but it seemed too incredible a coincidence that he would move in below me and then turn out to be torching my aunt’s building. Of course even sociopaths have to live someplace, and he couldn’t have known that my aunt lived in one of his target buildings. And that might explain his being awake and irritable so soon after the fire.

  My mind kept churning futilely. Finally I willed myself to turn it off. I flipped quickly through the mail. Two checks, goodie, and a handful of get-well cards from corporate clients. The obvious junk mail I pitched. The bills could certainly wait, but the incoming money would defray my expenses this afternoon.

  I stopped at a cash machine to deposit the money and withdraw a couple of hundred. Armed with that I walked west on Van Buren, hunting for a place that carried work clothes. The systematic mowing down of the Loop to make room for glitzy high rises has driven most of the low-rent business away. Van Buren used to be jammed with army surplus outlets, hardware shops, and the like, but only the peep shows and liquor stores have kept a tenacious hold on the area. They would probably go last.

  I had to walk the better part of a mile before I found what I was looking for, I bought a hard hat and a heavy set of coveralls and work gloves. At five-eight I’m tall for a woman, but I still fit easily into a man’s small.

  Everything looked too new to convince anyone I was a seasoned construction worker. Back in my office I laid the coveralls on the floor and scooted across them in my desk chair several times. Now they looked new but covered with grease.

  I keep a set of tools in my filing cabinet to work on the women’s toilet, which goes out an average of twice a month. Since Tom Czarnik would like to get rid of all women tenants, not just me, I’ve learned to do plumbing basics over the years. I took out the wrench and pounded my hard hat a few times. It still looked too new, but I was able to add a few artistic dents and scratches to it. It would have to do.

  I pulled the
coveralls on over my jeans, moving the gun to one of the deep side pockets, and added my small supply of office tools to the others. Useless on the Ryan, but I thought they gave me a touch of authenticity. I emptied the contents of my handbag into various other pockets and shut off the office lights. I’d left my hiking boots in the car. I wouldn’t put them on until I got to the Ryan-they were too hard to drive in. Tucking the hard hat under my arm, I took off again. This time it was my office phone that I ignored as I locked the dead bolt.

  The elevator, which had been running with great difficulty when I got back with my work clothes, had given out completely. I squared my shoulders and headed for the stairs.

  34

  Heat from the Top

  I laced up my boots and hiked up the broken on ramp I’d slid across in my street shoes last week. A good set of boots with treads made a big difference; I moved at a good clip to the top. In my hard hat and coveralls I fit in well enough that no one spared me a glance.

  As I tramped along the shoulder I realized I shouldn’t have worried about how new my clothes looked- concrete dust soon enveloped them. I pulled my sunglasses out of one of the front pockets to protect my eyes but I didn’t have any way to keep the dust out of my lungs. Still, my hacking cough gave me an added touch of authenticity. The only thing I lacked was a bandanna at the throat-in red or yellow it could be pulled up over the mouth when one was actually bent over an air hammer.

  Actually I was missing something else-a union card. Even if I’d wanted to risk recognition by the men in the trailer, I couldn’t go asking for the Alma Mejicana site without showing I belonged to the fraternity. I kept trudging along, looking for the bright red and green Wunsch and Grasso logo.

  I was stronger than I’d been two days ago, but the longer the hike became, the less enthusiasm I felt for my project. I realized, too, that the compleat construction worker ought to have strapped a water jar to her belt loops. It was cooler today than it had been for a while, but walking along in heavy overalls, lugging my wrenches, breathing the dust, turned my face hot and my throat scratchy. My shoulders sent up sympathetic warning shouts.

  Earplugs would have been a help too-the noise was staggering. Air hammers, giant earth movers, cement trucks, bulldozer-like things with evil-looking spikes attached to a front claw, combined with the shouting of several thousand men to raise a discordant chorus. Few of the genuine workers wore earplugs-it’s better to go deaf than display an unmanly weakness.

  I was walking south along the west side of the road. To my untutored eye this was the most complex part of the project, since they were adding a whole new lane for traffic merging south from the Eisenhower. I scanned that part of the construction, then strained to see around the traffic using the middle four lanes to make sure I didn’t miss the Wunsch and Grasso logo on the northbound side.

  I was almost at the I-55 turnoff before I found their equipment, mercifully on my side of the expressway. I hoisted myself up onto the guardrail to wait for my second wind while I surveyed the territory. The Alma Mejicana part of the operation involved about a half-dozen machines and perhaps twenty or thirty men.

  Their contingent wasn’t pouring concrete. Instead, as nearly as I could figure out, they were readying the roadbed, using giant rollers to mash rock into tiny pieces, then coming along after with another machine to smooth it down. The men not operating the machines were walking alongside them with picks and shovels, correcting flaws at the edges. Several stood by surveying the work.

  It was a busy, industrious scene, and despite the modern machinery, one that harked to an earlier era. None of the crew was black, and as far as I could tell none of them was Hispanic, either. Most of their hard hats were decorated with the Wunsch and Grasso logo. It’s one thing to borrow someone’s equipment, but even a small firm ought to be able to spring for their own hard hats.

  I hopped down from the fence and went up to one of the men surveying the work. Close to the rock crushers the noise was so intense that it took some effort to get the surveyor’s attention.

  When he finally looked up at me I bawled in his ear, “Luis Schmidt here today?”

  “Who?” he bellowed back.

  “Luis Schmidt!”

  “Don’t know him.”

  He turned back to the road, signaling to one of the men. I thought he was going to pass my inquiry on, but instead he wanted to point out something that had to be done to the roadbed. I tapped his arm.

  He jerked around impatiently. “You still here?”

  “Is this the Alma Mejicana site?”

  He rolled his eyes-dumb broad. He pointed at the machine nearest him. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re with Alma Mejicana and leasing equipment from Wunsch and Grasso.”

  He was beginning a scathing put-down when another one of the surveyors came over. “What’s going on here?” he demanded, silencing the first man with a commanding arm wave.

  “I’m looking for the Alma Mejicana crew,” I bawled. “I was told they were using Wunsch and Grasso equipment.”

  The second man dragged the first off to the side. They had an animated conversation that I couldn’t hear, but it involved a lot of gesturing-at the roadbed and at me. Finally the first man went on down the road another ten yards while the second came back to me.

  “Rudy’s new on the site. The crew are A-M men, but the foremen and the equipment are all from Grasso. He didn’t know that. What do you need here?”

  He thrust his weather-beaten face close to mine so I could hear him. Maybe I was being fanciful, but behind the film of white dust his expression seemed cold, almost menacing.

  “I’m looking for Luis Schmidt.” It was the only line I had so I stuck to it.

  “He’s not on the site. I’ll take a message for him.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t mind waiting.”

  “He won’t be here today, lady. Or tomorrow. So if you have a message, let me have it. If you don’t, get off the site.”

  He looked at a couple of men with picks and jerked his head. When they ambled over he said, “Lady got on the site by mistake. You want to see she gets off and stays off.”

  I held up my hands placatingly. “It’s okay, big guy-I can find my own way out. Anyway, I got what I came for.”

  I trotted northward at a good clip. The pick bearers trotted along next to me, keeping up a line of small talk that I fortunately couldn’t make out. No one could possibly attack me right here on the Dan Ryan with two thousand men to witness it. Assuming my screams penetrated the sound of the machinery, or they didn’t think I was a scab and join in mauling what was left of my body.

  About a half mile up the road, when I thought I might throw up from exertion, they decided they’d fulfilled their mission. One of them poked me playfully in the side with his pick. The other told me he guessed I’d learned my lesson but they could really make it stick-ha, ha-if I came back.

  I nodded without speaking and staggered clear of the roadbed to collapse on the slope rising up on its west side. I lay there for half an hour, sucking in great mouthfuls of chalky air. They couldn’t have known who I was. If there was some red alert out on me, they could easily have knocked me accidentally under one of the rock crushers. But they must have some general cautionary warning against anyone prying around about Alma Mejicana.

  What if I’d been with the feds? Would the second foreman still have behaved so precipitously? Massive bribe-taking doesn’t seem to have penetrated federal bureaucrats yet, but maybe Roz-through Boots-had some other source of protection for her cousin’s firm.

  From where I was lying the Sears Tower dominated the near horizon. The sun was low enough in the sky to turn its windows a fiery copper. It was too late for me to go to the Daley Center to look for any background on Farm-works, Inc. I lay there watching the fire on the tower mute into soft oranges, then darken.

  Finally I got to my feet and began the long trek back to my car. My legs were a bit wobbly-too much exertion too soon,
I told myself sternly. Nothing to do with the surge of fear over the guys with the pickaxes.

  Day crews were starting to pack it in. Night shifts hadn’t started yet. There was a lull in the noise and a general relaxation in the work frenzy. The machines were still moving doggedly, but the ground crews were standing around laughing, drinking longnecks that they somehow spirited onto the site.

  It took over half an hour to move the mile to my car. By then most of the other vehicles parked around it had left. Alone among the detritus under the giant stilts of the expressway, I shivered. When I got in the car I carefully locked the doors before starting.

  It was after five-thirty. I turned up Halsted instead of joining the packed throngs on the expressway or the drive. No one on the site knew who I was, but I didn’t take the hard hat off until I was north of Congress.

  When I got home I dumped the overalls and the hard hat in the hall closet and headed straight for the tub, I longed for sleep but I still had several errands to run. I tried to convince my wobbly legs and sore shoulders that a long bath would do them as much good as twelve hours of sleep. More good. It might have worked when I was twenty, but when you’re closer to forty than thirty there are some myths the body won’t believe.

  Carbohydrate packing was my next great idea. Although there was no fruit or meat in the house I still had onions, garlic, and frozen pasta. Just the kind of dish my mother thought adequate for a Saturday dinner, while my father, who could never bring himself to criticize her, longed privately for chicken and dumplings.

  I found a can of tomatoes in the back of my cupboard. I couldn’t remember buying this brand and studied the label dubiously, trying to figure out if they were still any good. I opened the can and sniffed. How do you tell if something is full of botulism? I shrugged and dumped them in with the onions. It would be fairly entertaining if I escaped the ravages of mad killers only to die of food poisoning in my own kitchen.

  If the tomatoes were poisoned they didn’t affect me immediately. In fact, the bath and the dinner did make me feel better-not as good as if I’d had my sleep, but good enough to go on for a bit. I was even whistling a little under my breath when I went into the bedroom to change.